Optical recording media with a super-resolution near field structure (super-RENS) offer the possibility to increase the data density of the optical recording medium by a factor of 3 in one dimension compared to a regular optical recording medium. This is made possible by a so-called super-RENS structure, which is placed directly above a data layer of the optical recording medium and significantly reduces the effective size of a light spot used for reading from and/or writing to the optical recording medium. At the same time the super-RENS structure allows to arrange more than one data track in each groove or land of the optical recording medium. An example of a super-resolution optical recording medium using three data tracks per groove/land is described in WO 2004/032123.
US 2002/027840 discloses an information read/write apparatus. The apparatus includes a dynamic control diffraction grating for adjusting the ration of the beam energy diffracted into the zero-order and higher-order light beams. In this way the energy of the side-beam used for tracking is kept at the same level during reading and recording.
For compatibility reasons it is desirable that an optical pickup for a super-resolution near field structure optical recording medium is also able to read from and/or write to optical recording media without a super-RENS structure or optical recording media with a super-RENS structure having only a single data track per groove and/or land. It is likewise desirable that an optical pickup for optical recording media having two or more data tracks is capable of accessing more than one data track at a time.